July 2010

Disturbing all of about two people, I took several months off from blogging. I just needed a break; call it writer’s block, busy mom syndrome, or whatever. After a while, it seemed like the quality of my thoughts and inspiration had degraded to the point of not being worth writing. I hope I’m past that now.

In those months, we’ve celebrated Alpha’s graduation from UT (BS in Mathematics). She has accepted the Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship at UC-Riverside to pursue her PhD in Math. That’s a lot of fancy speak for “one child off the payroll.” Lest that sound dismissive, make no mistake that I’m incredibly proud of her — for her academic achievements, and for her personal growth. She truly is ready to move on to the next step, and I know she’s going to do well.

Beta just completed her sophomore year as a Physics major at UT, and landed an internship with the Physics department for the Summer. At her first meeting with the prof she’s working for, she was told to get a passport. They sent her to CERN for two weeks. Now, this is Oak Ridge, so there are a few people around here who know what CERN is. I’ve been told repeatedly that undergraduates just don’t get that kind of opportunity. But she did, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I had a little fun joking that re-creating little black holes might not be a good thing, but she’s safely home and the world is still spinning.

Gamma spent most of her senior year working with some folks from her physics C class on their “Lemelson Project.” In that picture, she’s in the back row, 4th from the left. Far left in the back row is HWTFM, who took on the role of advising the team, along with a couple of other professionals from the community and the world’s greatest high school physics teacher. They presented their invention at Eurekafest at MIT at the end of June. She had a wonderful time hanging out for a week with other physics geeks from all over the country. Next month, we’ll cart her (and all her stuff) off to UT, to presumably begin her major in Materials Science & Engineering.

That will leave me, for the first time since mid-1990, with only one child at home. One child who, come October, won’t even need me to drive her around. Delta’s a lot of fun to be around though, so I expect it will be an entertaining three years as she makes her way through the rest of high school.

Yes, I’m aware that I haven’t written here in months. I took a break. This morning, I sat down to finally start back, but in (foolishly, I admit) attempting an automatic upgrade to WordPress 3.0, I managed to completely take out the admin code.

That’s the part that I need to be able to write, rather than just read what I already wrote.

Fortunately, I had the old code backed up, so I’m going to be working on this thing a bit today, and will resume posting shortly.